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Dan Balz's Take
Clinton Camp Plans Continued Battle
By Dan Balz
Like a good lawyer and political street fighter, Harold Ickes came to breakfast with a case to make and argued it with gusto.
"This is no compelling reason to shut this process down," the senior adviser to Hillary Clinton told a group of reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, "and there's no compelling reason not to allow the remaining states to vote and register their preferences, and there are very compelling reasons to keep the process going longer and have more voices heard."
But Ickes is both a tough advocate and a realist. If his candidate were to lose Ohio and Texas to Barack Obama next week, then what, he was asked? "I think if we lose in Texas and Ohio, Mrs. Clinton will have to make her decision as to whether she goes forward or not," he replied.
That question was for another day. Ickes's Monday morning mission was clear -- to stop the rolling narrative that suggests the race between Clinton and Barack Obama is all but over, to buy time between now and next Tuesday and to hope that his candidate can fend off Barack Obama in Texas and Ohio and live to fight another day.
The Clinton campaign knows what others think -- that she is struggling -- but Ickes said she is well positioned in both those states. Ickes used everything in his bag to make the case that perceptions of the Democratic race are misplaced and that calls to consider calling it over are just plain wrong.
The nomination battle is in month two of a five-month process, he said. Sixteen states and almost 1,000 delegates are still to be selected in the primaries and caucuses, he said, pointing out that the number still outstanding is almost half of what's needed to win the nomination.
The Obama campaign argues that even if Clinton narrowly wins Texas and Ohio, she will still trail Obama in pledged delegates. Ickes brushed aside that argument as Obama propaganda. Neither candidate, he argued, can emerge after the June 7 primary in Puerto Rico with enough pledged delegates to win the nomination.
Then the superdelegates -- or as Ickes calls them "automatic delegates" -- will come into play, and their role, he said, is exercise their own judgment, not be bound by who may lead in pledged delegates, as the Obama campaign has argued. "They are not sheep," he said.
Those superdelegates will have to evaluate the candidates on the basis of who can win in November. "Who will make a good, hopefully a great, president, and very, very importantly, who will be the strongest, most effective candidate again the Republican in the general election?" he asked. "Who can best withstand the relentless Republican attack machine, which is lying back there in the bushes ready to go and turn its full fire on our candidate."
In his estimation, the choice is clear. "Hillary Clinton is fully vetted," he said. "There' s nothing left to vet. In terms of Senator Obama, in my opinion, the vetting process has just begun." And to punctuate that point, he urged reporters to dig into Obama's background, to explore further his relationship with Tony Rezko and to examine his promises for inconsistencies.
"I'm not passing judgment on these in any way, shape or form," he said, to laughter from the reporters. "You all can laugh," he added. "But this is serious business."
Ickes even went so far as to argue that, had there been superdelegates at the 1972 Democratic convention, George S. McGovern, who lost in a landslide to Richard M. Nixon, might not have ended up as the party's nominee.
Ickes could not offer a plausible scenario under which Clinton would emerge from the primaries and caucuses with a lead in pledged delegates. When he said that the number of delegates left to be chosen represents almost half the number needed for the nomination, what he didn't say was that more than 70 percent of the total number of pledged delegates have already been selected.
After next Tuesday, only 20 percent of delegates will remain to be selected. Even if Obama narrowly loses Ohio and Texas, he may not lose much of his lead in the delegate count. That makes it ever harder for Clinton to emerge from the primaries with a lead or even tied with Obama no matter what happens in Texas next week.
"I understand that the Obama people want to lay down markers that we've got to win 65 percent here and 85 percent there and 70 percent there. Those markers are nice to play games with, but they're not serious markers," Ickes said.
Those are next week's problems. Ickes knew he could later deal with these problems if he can help make it possible for his candidate to prosper next Tuesday. After all, Ickes has been on both sides of the issue of the dispute over decisions by Michigan and Florida to move up their primaries.
As a senior adviser to Clinton, he wants the two delegations seated, despite a ban imposed by the Democratic National Committee. "We are talking about slapping two critically important states in the face and giving a wide opening to the Republicans," he said. "Now that doesn't make a lot of sense."
As a member of the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee, however, Ickes voted with others to strip the two states of their convention privileges. "At the time , we were worried about the calendar," he told the incredulous reporters. "That aspect is over."
Ickes will have new arguments next week if Clinton wins Ohio and Texas -- and the race will certainly look different if she does break Obama's winning streak. For now, Ickes acknowledged that he and the Clinton campaign are battling perceptions as well as realities.
At one point, he laid out his view of how the campaign might unfold. "That's our view," he said. "You may disagree. Let's see what happens."
Posted at 2:15 PM ET on Feb 25, 2008 | Category: Dan Balz's Take
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